Android Twitter App Showdown

Twitter is the choice social network for a lot of people. Some people out there really prefer Twitter over the other choices for digital gathering places on the web. Because of the a fast-paced nature of Twitter, using it while mobile is ideal. Whether you need access to @mentions or you use your DMs more than you use your email, you need the right Twitter application for Android.

Official Twitter for Android App

The Twitter application is an obvious choice to start with. This is the official application and is made by Twitter. As you can imagine, this application will be the closest you will get to using the Twitter website. If your main focus is to see your feed and to send the occasional update, this might be the perfect application for you.

You can search Twitter and follow people just like you can from the site. The bare minimum usage is available in the official Twitter application

HootSuite for Android

HootSuite is one of my personal favorites. The reason being is that it allows you to schedule tweets. This one feature is the reason it caught my eye. Aside from being able to schedule tweets, you can sign into several accounts. signing into several accounts within the same application makes it much easier to use Twitter for personal and business. There’s no need to sign out of one account and log into the other or run multiple Twitter applications simply because you have more than one account.

HootSuite also lets you log into other social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Foursquare. again, being able to log into these other networks makes it much easier to post updates. You can use the same update over several accounts or choose one.

UberSocial for Android

UberSocial also lets you add multiple Twitter accounts to one application. They also realize you probably follow a lot of popular people. Because some people you may follow will post much more than others, sometimes an important message may get lost in the feed. To remedy this problem, UberSocial lets you have a Favorite User list. Like other lists on Twitter, you can see specific users and their tweets without the clutter you may experience in your main feed.

The Mute a hashtag or user feature is one to make UberSocial more unique. When you’re tired of hearing about a specific topic, possibly a trending topic you have no interest in, you can mute the hash tag. Same way, you can mute tweets about a specific user. This will eliminate anything about them from your feed.

TweetCaster for Android

TweetCaster is a good middle ground between the official Twitter application in UberSocial. What TweetCaster brings to the game are features like Party Search. The Party Search feature lets you search your own timeline or someone else’s instead of everything on Twitter. The Party Search is useful when you know you were talking about something and need to find the tweet but don’t remember when.

SmartLists are another way TweetCaster set themselves apart. Many of the Twitter applications for Android do not let you create, view or manipulate your Twitter lists. TweetCaster does. SmartFilters are yet another way to filter out tweets in your timeline. Sometimes you may only need to see tweets that meet a specific criteria. By being able to use filters, you won’t need to sift through thousands and thousands of tweets that may not be what you’re looking for when you use the standard Twitter search.

TweetDeck for Android

TweetDeck is the mobile version of the wildly popular desktop application. We may be used to certain features when using the desktop, the mobile application lacks some of the features I like to use. Mainly the ability to schedule tweets.

When using TweetDeck, you’ll have columns just like in the desktop application. This makes it useful for saving searches or keeping tabs on any search terms that you find important. What’s nice is, if you used TweetDeck for desktop, all your columns will sync with TweetDeck for Android.

Final Thoughts

With all the different Twitter applications out there, it’s a matter of deciding which features are important to you. While not all of the Twitter applications for Android have the same features, they all will do the basics like search, post updates, and it’s allow you to add new people. Anything over and above that is going to be what sets the applications apart from each other.